PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is a crawler run by Perplexity. It indexes the web for Perplexity answers.
What it does
PerplexityBot crawls pages to build the search index an AI platform answers from. Most operators use a separate user agent for each job, so you can usually allow or block one without affecting the others.
Crawlers that build search indexes used by AI platforms. Access supports discovery but does not guarantee a listing or citation.
User agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)This is a full user agent string PerplexityBot sends. Version numbers change over time; match the PerplexityBot token rather than the whole string.
robots.txt
To block PerplexityBot, add this to the robots.txt at the root of your site:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /Blocking it keeps your pages out of that index, so the platform has less of your content to find and cite. Allowing it makes your pages eligible, not guaranteed, to appear in answers.
To allow it explicitly, for example after a broader rule blocks other crawlers:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /Check what your robots.txt allows for PerplexityBot and the other AI crawlers in this directory.
Verifying requests
Perplexity publishes the IP addresses PerplexityBot uses. A request that claims to be PerplexityBot from any other address is not genuine.
In SurfacedBy
SurfacedBy's AI traffic tracking recognizes PerplexityBot in the user agent and checks each request against Perplexity's published addresses. Only requests that pass count as crawls; the rest are shown separately.
Operator documentation
Details on this page come from Perplexity's own documentation: docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers.